Help: A Two-Headed Coin

Help is an arm’s reach away and yet it’s one of the things we fear most doing. We fear no one reaching back. We fear appearing weak and incapable of handling things ourselves. We fear rejection. We fear shame.

We fear ridicule.

We fear hearing, “no”.

We fear………..

So rather than feel any of the above we can often suffer in silence. We can slip into despair. We can become cold and aloof.

We can even go so far as to not accept help because, believe it or not, we’ve created an intimate bond with our fearing self. It becomes part of our story.

The story we retell to others that ‘every time’ I ask for help I never receive it. Or the story we retell to others that ‘nobody’ will help us. Or the story we retell to others ‘everybody' else has their own problems and I don’t want to burden them.

Yet interestingly enough every person I’ve ever asked how they feel about helping others, they would sit a little taller or stand with their shoulders a little more pulled back their heads up, and say, “I’d do anything to help someone”. No questions asked. No wondering whether they could handle the task or not, just a resounding “Yes!”

So how is it that people receive help? If the major refuse to ask for help for the aforementioned reasons, and yet there’s just as equal of a major who will jump in and help without questions, how is it we still struggle?

Our pride aka ego aka inner critic appears to have taken up permanent residence in the fear zone, and let me just share the fear zone is ginormous in nature. It encompasses all the space that falls outside of love.

The really interesting part is we stay in the fear zone when it comes to asking for our own wants, needs, and help, yet we are lightening flashing when it comes to jumping to the love zone to help others.

What I’ve learned is when we don’t ask for what we need aka help, we suffer. When we don’t ask for what we need aka help, it becomes harder and harder to do so in the future. When we don’t ask for what we need aka help, we are unable to help others from a fully whole, healthy space because we are doing so from our wounded self’s space. It can quickly turn into, without it being consciously intentional, a need to helps because in some way it’s helping ourselves. Yet the reality is we aren’t healing ourselves from our unwillingness to ask or receive our own help but only giving help to others.

The Universe is so beautiful in always drawing experiences to us in order for us to heal and repair our own fears, worries, and wounds, and sometimes those experiences can be the most painfully humbling of them all.

How many have also been relentless in offering your help to others who appear and have even made comments they need it, and yet absolutely refuse it when freely given to them?

Again our pride aka ego aka inner critic wants everything to remain status quo and if someone actually does get better, does receive help, admits they need it and receives it that ultimately will change things and that, quite frankly, SCARES THE SHIT out of the ego aka pride aka inner critic.

So I ask, “What’s the pay off for not asking or receiving help?” “What do you gain?” We all gain something from our stories that we remain so intimately tangled with. Is it heroic? Is it glamorous? Is it humble? Is it victim? It’s something because if we weren't getting something from it that served beneficial to us we wouldn’t keep doing it.

Unfortunately though unless we truly look at it from a very blatant fashion it’s so easy to ignore it and keep on keeping on, suffering in silence and all.

You, dear Beloveds, deserve to change, modify, and even write a new chapter of your story that releases you from this fear of not being able to ask for what you need or help. To be able to ask unabashedly because you now believe asking for help is not a weakness or something to be ashamed of, but in order to do that you have to be willing to first look at your story, then ask for the help you need to direct the next chapter of your storyline in a different direction. A direction that will quite possibly feel different, and yet simultaneously healing.

What will your next chapter say about you?